


kingdom come

by clintasha



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Italian Mafia, Mafia AU, Slow Burn, listen this entire thing is just me being on crack, or something, so i'm begging you not to take any of it seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-01 01:29:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21314563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clintasha/pseuds/clintasha
Summary: natasha romanoff is a member of one of the fbi’s elite anti-mafia units, waging war on the five families. clint barton is the street enforcer for the maximoff crime family, known as the emperor of queens and one of the most feared figures in new york city. natasha has been chasing him for years, getting closer with every informant and raid and undercover mission. the only thing she hasn’t given much thought to is what she’ll do when she finally catches him.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 21
Kudos: 34





	1. ain’t playing when i come up in the game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> and i don’t really care if you had other plans  
i’m the type of man that’ll ruin it  
told you i ain’t playing when i come up in the game  
imma bring my whole goddamn crew in it  
\- all rise by yonas

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey hi hello
> 
> so this is my nano project for this year, and i am coming into it with zero notes, plan, or idea of where it is going to go. i have never written these two before, so it's going to be an adventure for all of us. i have done little to no research, and i have barely even read this through a second time before posting, so buckle up. thank you so much for reading; please leave me comments, suggestions, questions, etc!
> 
> emily, gracie, shelby: i owe y'all everything. thank you for listening to me scream about stuff, putting up with my 600 questions a day, and constantly encouraging me.
> 
> xx  
a

The longest relationship Natasha has ever had is with Clint Barton, and he doesn’t even know who she is.

She, on the other hand, knows every iteration of him. He has a lot of identities, a lot of names, a lot of aliases shielding him from the eyes of authority. From her eyes. In the streets, he is known as the Emperor of Queens, the street enforcer for the Maximoff crime family, one of the most feared figures in New York City. She has heard him called Hawkeye, Street Soldier, Ink.

Cop Killer.

And she should know everything about him. She has been following him for two years after all. And if there is anything Natasha is good at, it is research.

She knows that Barton started out as a loan shark enforcer when he was probably not even eighteen years old. She can’t find a lot of information about him as a teenager, only that he grew up in the slums of New York and got kicked out of every school he ever went to, dropping out once he realized that he could make just as much money with his fists as he could with his brain. He caught the eye of one of Django Maximoff’s men who brought him into the lowest level of the crime family as an earner.

After a few years as an earner, he was officially inducted into the mob, becoming a made man. He moved up the ladder quickly from there, leading his own group of soldiers as a capo for a while before he was appointed as the head enforcer for the entire Maximoff crime family.

That was almost two years ago, and in those two years, Barton has earned a reputation for being aggressive and egocentric and vicious. Natasha is well-versed in the activities of the mob; she has been a member of one of the FBI’s elite anti-Mafia units for five years, waging war on the Five Families. She knows how they operate, that the families are pulling in seven billion dollars in profit a year through drug trafficking and extortion and kickbacks and racketeering and casinos and intimidation marketed as protection. It is a multibillion dollar East Coast crime cooperative, and the truly frustrating part is that no one has been able to do anything about it.

Juries refuse to convict. Made men refuse to talk. And Natasha knows that is because of Barton.

As the head enforcer for the Maximoff family, he has personally executed more people than anyone else in the Mafia. She can’t prove it, but she knows that it is true. She knows that six months ago, Wanda Maximoff took over the family after Django ended up in prison. This is when Wanda founded Murder, Inc., the Mafia’s first unit of professional contract killers. They are assassins; there are twelve members from all five families, and Barton stands at the head. She knows that they are paid to track down and kill victims. She knows that informers are left with rats in their mouths and witnesses who testify in court have their eyes removed. She knows that Barton’s method of choice is an ice pick through the ear and into the brain. She knows that they hide bodies so that the victim’s family can’t collect life insurance. She knows all of this.

She just can’t prove it. Not yet, anyways. But she’s going to.

So she waits. She does her research. She spends hours and hours with her partner, James Rhodes, surveying Mafia funerals and weddings and christenings and dinners. She gets her hands on guest lists and gift lists, spends hours charting family trees with lines spider-webbing in every direction. She learns Italian and Russian. She investigates lawyers and accountants and businessmen. And she watches Barton from afar, learning how he moves and operates and thinks.

She is going to be the one to take down Clint Barton if it is the last thing she ever does.

“Natasha is going in tonight,” Rhodey says. He sounds nervous. He is nervous. He has always been more careful than Natasha, thinking through the pros and cons of every option before they pick one. That is why he has been her partner since she made it through Quantico. That’s why they work.

It feels like they have been in this briefing for hours, but when Natasha looks at the clock, she sees that it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon and they have only been in this stuffy room at the federal building for about forty-five minutes. Thankfully, there’s a window, and Natasha can see all the way down to the city below.

She zones out a little bit, snapping back to attention when her boss says her name sharply. “Romanoff. Are you even listening?”

She turns back to the table, tapping her pen against the notebook in front of her. “Yes,” she says, sighing. “But we’ve gone over this plan about a hundred times. It’s all going to be fine.”

“I know it’s going to be fine.” Tony Stark narrows his eyes at her, and she sits up a little straighter. He has that effect on people. “I wouldn’t be sending you in if I wasn’t sure that it was going to be fine.”

“I know, boss.”

“So tell me again.”

She looks around the table. Rhodey is bent over his notebook, flipping through the pages like it’s the Mafia Bible itself, the membership roster for all five of the families. It’s just another thing Natasha knows about but can’t prove. That is the mantra for this entire line of work, she found very early on. T’Challa is watching her intently, raising an eyebrow at her as he waits for her to say something. The newest agent on the Barton team, Peter, is leaning forward in his chair, looking like he is about to burst out and start reciting the plan himself if Natasha doesn’t start in on it soon. He is fresh out of the academy, and while it took Natasha years to work her way up to the anti-Mafia unit, he is apparently some sort of whiz kid.

“Okay, fine.” She pushes her notebook away from her, leaning back in her chair again and propping her legs up on the table, knowing it will piss Tony off. “Two weeks ago, we received word through a confidential informant that Barton is going to target the district attorney who put Maximoff in prison.”

T’Challa is in charge of their informants. In the five years that Natasha has been in this unit, she has almost never been able to find anyone who will talk. T’Challa, on the other hand, is incredibly talented at soliciting information from people who would normally think twice about giving it. People want to talk to him. He seems likable. He seems dependable. He seems like he will be able to protect you. And when he managed to get information about the hit put out on the district attorney who was able to have Django Maximoff sentenced to life in prison, it was one of the biggest scores the team has ever secured.

“We have heard through the grapevine that Barton will be at the gala tonight, presumably because Osborn will also be in attendance.” The Hope Gala is tonight, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. It is black-tie, invitation only, and definitely not the sort of thing Natasha imagines Barton spends his Friday night doing. But apparently that’s where he will be, and therefore so will she. “I’m going to get as close as I can, keep an eye on him, and see if I can get any information from him.”

“If anyone can, it’s you,” Rhodey says, and even though he’s looking down, she can see the smirk playing across his face.

“Shut up.”

For as much as they know about Barton, there is still a whole lot they don’t know. He is unbelievably careful about showing his face in public, which makes it even more unusual that he will be at such a high-profile event. If Natasha knows anything about how he usually works, it is that he does so in secret. He has eleven other men by his side and an army of about a hundred associates beneath him. Normally, the associates are the ones who abduct the targets from their homes or cars or off the street. Barton is going against the pattern, and that makes everyone, even Natasha, a little nervous.

Tony frowns, and she continues. “Rhodey will be outside in the van with T’Challa and Peter, keeping an eye on Osborn.” They have briefed the district attorney on what is going on, assuring him that he will be safe. He doesn’t seem so worried; Natasha figures that this isn’t the first death sentence he has had hanging over his head. It is, however, the first time he has been targeted by Wanda Maximoff. “It is highly unlikely that Barton is going to try to carry out the hit tonight. Not with that many people around.”

“But we don’t know,” Tony interjects.

“We don’t. That’s why the three musketeers will be across the street. I’ll call them in if I need them.”

“You will.” Tony pins her down with a glare. “You will not attempt to do this on your own, Romanoff. I’m serious.”

“I know.” She barely manages to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

“All you’re going to do tonight is observe. If you think it’s safest to stay back and watch him, then you do that. Do not engage unless you are sure.”

Natasha has been following Barton for a long time, but this will be the closest she has ever gotten. He lays low, preferring to work from the shadows. She has seen grainy surveillance footage, some low-resolution pictures taken from across streets and through curtains and under the cover of darkness, his booking photo from the time he was arrested when he was sixteen for lifting cars. She knows what he looks like as well as she knows her own face. But she has never heard him speak, never been near him, never observed him up close. Everything she knows comes from research and intel and theory.

He is the stuff of legends.

“I know,” she says again, pushing back and dropping her legs to the ground, leaning forward. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“You’re not going to pull a Budapest?”

“You and I remember Budapest very differently,” she mumbles, looking out the window again.

Tony ignores her. “Go home, Romanoff. Be back here at seven-thirty ready to go.”

She isn’t going to argue with that, not when he is letting her go an hour and a half early. Rhodey follows her out, still going over logistics as they walk back to their offices. “We’ll be two minutes away the entire time, but you have to communicate with me, okay? We can’t help you if we don’t know where you are. And you tell me if you’re about to make contact. And remember, if something goes down and you have to be discreet, the code phrase is-”

“With a twist,” Natasha finishes, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. “I know.”

Rhodey grabs her arm, stopping her just before she can duck into her office to grab her bag. “Nat.”

She sighs, turning to him. “It’s going to be fine. I promise. I swear, you people need to have more faith in me.”

Natasha is good at her job. She is ex-military; she was special forces, Ranger Battalion, for four years before she joined the FBI. She isn’t scared of anything, something that Rhodey sometimes tells her is not an asset. “You have to be scared of some stuff, Natasha,” he says. “You run in headfirst without thinking about the danger that you might be.” It has gotten her in hot water more than once. But that’s why she has Rhodey; he reins her in and she pushes him.

“I have faith. But I don’t know what I will do if something happens to you.”

“Rhodey.” She puts her hands on his shoulders, looking at him intently. “It’s a simple mission. Just intel. Nothing is going to happen.”

She can tell that he doesn’t believe a word she is saying. But that’s okay because she believes in him, and she sure as hell believes in herself.

She doesn’t stop working, even when she gets back to her tiny shoebox of an apartment. (Being an FBI agent in New York City is not as glamorous as popular culture makes it out to be, that’s for damn sure.) Instead, she pulls out her Barton file, a rubber banded accordion folder that is as thick as her fist. Everything she knows about him is in these documents, and she is going to make doubly sure that she knows them cold before she walks into the gala.

Seven million dollars. That’s what he pulled in last year as his personal profit. She doesn’t know much about his illegal activities, although the modus operandi for the Mafia tends to be drugs and prostitution. She only knows that he cleans his money by investing in real estate and night clubs and boxing champions. He has houses in New York, Florida, North Carolina, and someday she plans to ask him, when she finally has him cuffed to a metal table in an interrogation room, how he could live so large and leave so little for the rest of the world.

♚♚♚

Of course Clint knows who Natasha Romanoff is. Everyone in the Maximoff family knows who she is. Hell, everyone in the Five Families knows who she is.

She is across the room from him right now, all tight black dress and curves and dark red hair shimmering under the lights of the chandeliers hanging above them. He has no idea how she found him, how she knew he was going to be here, whether she is here because of his hit on Osborn or because it is part of the routine surveillance that her goddamn team does on the regular, but he does know this: he is going to talk to her tonight.

It cannot be a coincidence that she is in this ballroom right now. She is a mob boss hunter; Wanda calls her the Black Widow, which is high praise coming from Wanda (and a hell of a lot nicer than some of the other things that she has said about Romanoff).

Six months ago, the Maximoff family was turned upside down. Django Maximoff, the reigning mob boss and the de facto leader of the Five Families, was sentenced to life in prison. Clint still doesn’t know what happened, and honestly he thinks that Wanda doesn’t either. All he does know is that somebody flipped. He doesn’t know who, but he is going to figure it out, and he is going to take that goddamn district attorney down too.

Django was one of the original godfathers, and he was the head of an American mob delegation that was attempting to negotiate a pact with the Sicilian Mafia to import heroin into the United States. Clint doesn’t touch the drug game, never has, and he always hated that that’s what Django’s endgame was. But he was Django; you never argued with him, not if you wanted to live. Once Wanda took over, she scrapped the negotiations, focusing her energy on forming Murder, Inc., appointing Clint as its commander, and ordering him to figure out where their leak is.

He figures that he can loosen the district attorney’s tongue a little before he kills him. That is why he didn’t delegate this job to one of his soldiers. It is too important, usurping everything, even Clint’s urge to lay low, every neuron in his brain screaming at him to get out of there.

He hasn’t seen Osborn yet. He knows that he was on the list, but there’s a fifty-fifty chance that he doesn’t show, especially now that Romanoff is here. He knows that she tipped him off. He sees Bucky and Sam across the room, lingering over by the buffet table. (Count on the two of them to find the food immediately, even when they are supposed to be as discreet as possible.) If you didn’t know that they were Mafia, you would never know that they were Mafia.

Bucky catches his eye across the room, tipping his head in Romanoff’s direction. Clint shakes his head slightly, so slight that no one else would even be able to tell that he is doing it. But Bucky can tell, and he narrows his eyes, frowning.

If Clint has a reputation in the underworld for being ruthless, Bucky is something else entirely. Wanda’s second in command, Rogers, pulled him right out of the Russian mafia. By the time they got him, he was already a trained assassin, not as good as Clint but pretty damn close. Clint spends a lot of time reining him in. He makes his way over to Bucky, moving seamlessly through the crowd of people in tuxes and evening gowns.

“Easy, Barnes,” he mutters when he gets close, leaning over the table so that it looks like he is just taking a stuffed mushroom cap. “Not yet.”

“She’s right there,” Bucky says, his voice so low that Clint has to tilt his head closer to hear it. “You know Wanda would want us to take her out.”

“She’s a federal agent,” Sam says, coming up on Bucky’s other side. “Wanda would not want us to take her out right here.”

“You know she’s the reason Django went down.”

“No,” Clint says firmly. “She’s part of the reason. The majority of the reason is the rat, and it’s our job to figure out who that is and make them pay for it. If you go after her right now, it’s going to blow everything.”

“But-”

“No. Stand down.”

“Fine.” Bucky crosses his arms, looking even more menacing than usual.

If Bucky is the one who flies off the handle sometimes and Clint is known for being coldhearted, Sam brings them back to earth. He grew up in Harlem, and he was another one of Rogers’s hires, picked up on the street after Sam’s father was killed and he left home as a teenager. Clint was the one who turned him from an angry, grieving, gangbanger of a kid into a professional criminal. Together, the three of them are unstoppable.

Clint is just planning his next play when his phone buzzes against his chest, and he pulls it out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

**Wanda Maximoff**

**Eyes on Osborn?**

**Negative. FBI here. Likely no show.**

**Get out of there.**

**Now.**

**Don’t even think about it, Barton.**

Wanda is a truly terrifying person. Unlike Clint or Bucky or Sam or any of the rest of them, she grew up in this life. She wasn’t picked up off the streets. Clint knows that her father used to take her to meetings when she wasn’t even old enough to walk. She doesn’t know anything different, and that is what makes her such a good boss. She has no fear.

But Clint isn’t scared of her. His relationship with Wanda is special. It’s different. She trusts him more than she trusts almost anyone else, except for Rogers, her second in command, and maybe her advisor, Scott Lang. She gives him free rein to do whatever he wants, to make the decisions that he thinks are best (because they usually are best). She knew when she appointed him as her executioner that no one tells Clint Barton what to do.

That never stops her from trying.

Clint shoves his phone back into his pocket, putting the untouched mushroom cap down on the table. Bucky grabs it, shoving it in his mouth. “What’s the play, boss?”

“Stay here.” Clint doesn’t look at his men as he gives the order. “Lay low.”

Sam is looking at his phone. “They’ve got FBI in a van out front,” he says. “Some on the roof across the street too.”

“Watch my six.”

It’s a dangerous play. He knows it. Sam and Bucky know it. And if Wanda were here, she would be wringing his neck right about now. But he knew the second he saw Romanoff in person that he wouldn’t be able to help himself. Redheads were always his weakness.

She is over by the bar, and it takes him a couple of minutes to weave through the room since there are people he has to stop and talk to, people he has done business with or provided protection for or who frequent the exclusive clubs and casinos he bankrolls. But he finally makes his way over to Romanoff, reaching out and sliding a hand over the bare skin of her back as he steps up to the bar next to her.

“Can I get you a drink?” he says smoothly in her ear, and she turns to look at him, her eyes widening slightly as she does.

She composes herself quickly, her face slipping back into a smooth mask of indifference. Her hair is swept to one side, and he knows that underneath the curtain of red she has an earpiece in, so tiny that you wouldn’t be able to see it unless you were looking for it. But Clint knows it’s there, and he knows that he needs to make every word count.

“Sure,” she says easily, like the man she’s been following for years hasn’t suddenly appeared right in front of her. He hopes that she’s a little flustered, even if she is refusing to show it.

Even in heels, she is a couple of inches shorter than him. “You look like a martini with a twist kind of girl.”

“No,” she says quickly, her voice rising. “Glenfiddich. Neat.”

He can feel her watching him as he leans over the bar, ordering two and stuffing some money in the glass vase sitting next to him. As he waits for the bartender to slide the glasses across the bar, he considers his next move. She knows exactly who he is. And Clint knows that she knows. The only question is whether she knows that he knows. It’s rapidly turning into a web of lies. Good thing Clint thrives on deception.

“You look familiar,” Clint says, quickly deciding to feign ignorance. “Have we met before?”

Romanoff is a federal agent; she knows how to lie, and she knows how to do it well. “I don’t think so.” Her words come easily. “But I come to this kind of thing a lot.”

Clint leans against the bar, fully facing her now. “You’re right.” He tilts his head at her, handing over her glass. “You do not seem like the kind of woman I would easily forget.” The slightest hint of red rushes to her cheeks, and she ducks her head to cover it.

There are people lining up behind them to get to the bar, so Clint grabs his glass in one hand, taking Romanoff’s in the other, and he pulls her off to the side of the ballroom, away from the crush of the crowd surrounding the bar and the tables. His phone is vibrating like crazy; he knows that Wanda must be losing her damn mind, and he scans the crowd quickly, spotting Sam and Bucky who have wandered over to the bar for a better view. Bucky raises an eyebrow at him, and Clint nods. Everything is fine.

“So what’s your name, sweetheart?” he asks, turning back to Romanoff.

“Natalie.” So they’re doing the fake names then. “Natalie Rushman.”

“Natalie. That’s real pretty.”

“And you are?”

“Clint,” he says, reveling in the shock that flashes over her face when he gives her his real name. “Clint Barton. It’s nice to meet you.”

“And what do you do?” She is cutting right to the chase.

“A little bit of everything.” He knows that she is about to ask him another question, try to get him to slip up, and he needs to head her off at the pass. “Do you want to dance?”

Two minutes later, Clint has one hand planted firmly in the center of her back, the other holding hers lightly, and they are moving gracefully around the dance floor, Clint being very careful not to step on her feet. There is zero endgame here; he knows it. All he is doing is putting himself and his team in danger, but he knew the moment he saw her that this is where they were going to end up. He has no idea why, but he is going to figure it out.

“So, Natalie.” He leans closer, making sure that she can hear him over the music and the chatter and the clinking of glasses. “What brings you out tonight?”

“Good cause. Free alcohol. Handsome men in tuxes.” Her lips practically brush his ear, and he can feel every well-defined muscle in her back underneath his fingers, her skin practically burning him.

“I hope you’re including me in that.”

“I could be.” She pulls back to look at him. “If you play your cards right.”

Clint has had a lot of women in his life. He has never been all that discerning in his personal life, although he of all people probably should be. But he can easily say that none of them have ever been as beautiful as Romanoff with the hair and those big bright eyes and clear skin and full lips. Wanda is going to fucking murder him.

The song ends, and behind Romanoff’s back, he can see Sam, not even trying to be discreet anymore, shaking his head vigorously at Clint. He knows that they have to get out. But it is at that moment that he spots Osborn; the bastard did show up after all.

All they are supposed to be doing is watching, standing back in the shadows and getting as much information about Osborn as he can. Clint knows that the second Osborn leaves this building, at least two of his soldiers will be following him, learning his habits, so that nothing is left to chance when Clint decides the time is right. And he knows that without a doubt he only has about three minutes before Bucky loses it completely and does something stupid.

“Come here,” Clint says, pulling Romanoff off the dance floor and behind one of the pillars. He pushes her up against it, settling one arm against it and boxing her in. Something flashes in her eyes, and he knows that at any moment she could call her backup in and his entire game could be up. But for some reason, he doesn’t think that she’s going to do that. She doesn’t seem like the backup type.

He really hopes that Sam is holding Bucky back because they are going to have all of thirty seconds to get out of here when he is done with Romanoff.

“What are the chances that I see you again?” he asks, sliding his other hand underneath the hair at the back of her neck, his thumb just brushing her chin. He knows that for all the hours she probably spent planning out tonight, this situation had never crossed her mind.

“Pretty good.” She clears her throat, looking up at him, and he forgets for a second that she is the person who has been tracking his every movement for longer than he even knows.

Time to go in for the kill.

He brushes her hair out of the way before she even realizes what is happening, plucking the earpiece from her ear and holding it out to her. “That’s what I thought, Agent Romanoff. I’ll try to keep things interesting. Wouldn’t want you to get bored watching all of that surveillance video. But just know that when you’re thinking about me late at night, trying to figure out how you’re going to catch me…” He leans in close, so close that he could kiss her if he wanted to. (He’s starting to think that he wants to.) Her eyes are wide and her lips are slightly parted, and he knows that he has managed to render her completely speechless. “I’m thinking of you too.”

He grabs her hand, dropping the earpiece into it and wrapping her fingers around it. He figures that is his cue to leave, and he takes a couple of steps backwards, trying to drink in the sight of her while he still can. “See you around, Nat.”

It feels like it takes him ages to get back across the ballroom to where Sam and Bucky are having a heated (albeit whispered) argument. “Time to go,” Clint says, not even bothering to turn around to see if they are following him. Good thing he thought ahead, paying one of the valets a hundred bucks to keep the car ready and waiting out back by the loading dock.

Clint figures that by the time they are speeding away from the Plaza, Romanoff is just starting to brief her team about what just happened. The look on her face when he used her real name stays in his head the rest of the night: when they get back to his penthouse at 19 Dutch, when Wanda comes storming in and spends twenty minutes giving him a lecture, when she orders him to get back out there and find Osborn.

And he absolutely thinks of Romanoff late that night when he has Osborn tied up in the basement of one of the warehouses, blood dripping onto the floor from the handle of the knife that fits Clint’s hand like it was made for him. (It was.) She is going to lose her fucking mind when she realizes that they plucked Osborn right out of his apartment, right out from under her nose, especially since she already let Clint get away. It’s been a long time since Clint has gone toe to toe with somebody; the game is going to be a whole lot more fun now that he has seen her up close, felt her skin underneath his hands, seen that look in her eyes.

He crouches down in front of Osborn. “I’m going to give you one more chance to tell me who your informant was,” he says, ice dripping from his words. “And for the sake of your family, I would take it.”

Clint is going to sleep good tonight.


	2. stole many a man's soul to waste

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> please allow me to introduce myself  
i’m a man of wealth and taste  
i’ve been around for a long, long year  
stole many a man’s soul to waste  
\- sympathy for the devil by the rolling stones

When Natasha turns around and sees Clint Barton standing next to her, his hand on her back and that fucking smirk on his face, she thinks her legs might give out completely. Rhodey is practically screaming in her ear (“Who is that? What’s going on? Is that him? Goddammit, Nat!”), and she has to stop herself from ripping the earpiece out of her ear. She hopes that her shock isn’t too obvious, even as her brain is screaming at her.

Clint Barton is touching her back.

Honestly, they had not considered this possibility. Everyone had been concerned that Natasha would throw caution to the wind and go right up to Barton; no one had been concerned that Barton would approach her. Why would he? He has always had the advantage; why would he give that up?

All of these thoughts are running through her brain as he asks her if he can get her a drink, her mind quickly snapping back to attention when he says the words “with a twist.” Rhodey, in her ear, is losing it. (“The code phrase! He said the code phrase!”)

“No,” Natasha snaps quickly to shut him up. Instead, she asks for Glenfiddich, figuring that if he is going to buy her a drink, then it might as well be an expensive one.

There is no way in hell that he knows who she is or who she works for. She has been extremely careful. T’Challa and Vision are the ones who have gone undercover; Natasha has stayed fully out of the missions, choosing instead to step back, gather intelligence, and link everything together. That is what she is best at. Even when Django was arrested, she never met with him, always staying behind the glass, watching T’Challa interrogate him.

Even so, she gives him a fake name, not volunteering any information about herself, especially when he asks her if they have met before. She accepts his invitation to dance, hoping that she can eke even a little bit of information out of him. But he seems more interested in looking her up and down, and she would be lying if she said that she hadn’t noticed how broad his shoulders were underneath the jacket of his tuxedo. But then he pulls her off the dance floor, trapping her up against a pillar, and she remembers very quickly that he has murdered more people in cold blood than she can even list.

When he slides his hand around the back of her neck, stroking her cheek gently with his thumb, she thinks she blacks out for a moment. Natasha, the person who is always one step ahead, who does her research and can think on her feet and is trained to expect every scenario, has no idea what the fuck is going on. But then he pulls the earpiece out of her ear, calls her Agent Romanoff (calls her Nat, for fuck’s sake), and then waltzes away like he didn’t just send their entire team into a spiral.

Rhodey is actually screaming now; she can hear him even before she gets the earpiece back in. “Get out of there, Nat! Now!”

Natasha scans the crowd for Barton, sees him disappearing with two men on his heels, both of whom look just as menacing as him. “He’s going out the back,” she hisses. “Watch out.”

“Let him go,” T’Challa says smoothly, a big contrast to the panic that Rhodey is radiating. “You need to leave, Natasha. Let him go.”

“Osborn is still here,” she says, spotting the man across the room. “Somebody has got to get him out of here.”

“And it’s not going to be you.” Now there is an edge in T’Challa’s voice now. “Out. Now.”

She leaves, but she’s not happy about it.

She is even less happy about it the next morning when she is woken up by a call from Tony at a quarter to four. “Osborn is gone,” he says, his voice grim, and she sits up, suddenly wide awake.

“What do you mean he’s gone?”

“I mean he’s gone, Romanoff. We had a team outside of his apartment all night, so I don’t know how they did it but he’s missing.”

“They took him.”

“It’s unconfirmed, but yes.”

“Goddammit.” Natasha is already up and moving, the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder as she roots around in the dirty clothes hamper for jeans that are passable enough to wear. “What do you need me to do?”

“Be here in an hour,” Tony says, and the line goes dead.

Natasha barely got any sleep last night; she was up late thinking about every word Barton said to her and every look he gave her and the way he touched her back and her neck and her face. And she keeps coming to the same conclusion: if she didn’t know that he was a murderer, she would never think that he was a murderer. And then her brain tells her, very quickly and violently, that he is in fact a murderer, one of the worst she has ever seen. And she just let him get away like that.

Goddammit.

The walk to the office is brisk, the October air chilling her skin and making her cheeks red, and while it’s only about ten minutes long it gives her a whole lot more time to think about Barton.

Even though she has been following him for years, learning everything about him and studying him, it was an entirely different thing to have him right in front of her like that. He was not all what she expected, charming and smooth and bright. And in the moment, when her heart was racing and Rhodey was screaming in her ear and she had no idea what to expect, she didn’t take even a moment to stop and think about the fact that goosebumps popped up on her skin when he touched her and her heart felt like it was in her throat.

She certainly is not going to tell Rhodey about that part.

But God bless him, he has coffee, handing her a cup when she walks into the office on the seventeenth floor of the federal building. She goes to sit down at her desk, check her email and take a second before Tony rips her a new one, but T’Challa comes by before her butt even hits the chair.

“Nope,” he says, shaking his head and pulling her upright. “Time to go.”

She rolls her eyes, ignoring the burn in her throat at the giant gulp of coffee she swallows as she follows him into the conference room. Tony is there, looking like he got a full eight hours of sleep even though she knows that he has probably been up all night. Peter is next to him, his laptop already up and running, the blue light reflected in his glasses as he leans over it.

Tony doesn’t look up at her as she sits down between T’Challa and Rhodey, and she knows that he is pissed. It might not necessarily be at her, but she can feel the anger coming off of him in waves. They sit in silence for a few moments before Rhodey clears his throat - he is the only one who could get away with doing that a time like this.

“Tony.”

Tony looks up, putting his dark-rimmed glasses down on the table and rubbing his temples. “You all know as much as I do at this point,” he begins. “At some point in the middle of the night, Osborn was taken from his apartment. His wife and kids were left behind.”

“Unharmed?”

“Yes. We don’t officially know who is responsible but…” He cuts his eyes at Natasha.

“Barton.”

Tony reaches into the file folder sitting in front of him, sliding two surveillance photos across the table towards them. Natasha grabs them before Rhodey or T’Challa can even move. “These were the two guys with him last night.”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” T’Challa says, nodding at the picture in her left hand. “Steve Rogers poached him from the Russians a few years ago.”

“And him?”

“Samuel Thomas Wilson. Been with Barton for a while.”

“So they’re both Murder, Inc.”

“As far as we know…” Rhodey grabbed the photos from her, looking at them carefully. “Yes.”

“Then why haven’t I been briefed on them before now?” Natasha could feel the anger bubbling in her chest. “I walked in there blind!”

“Because they weren’t supposed to be there,” Peter said quickly. “These two don’t come out of hiding, same as Barton. We know damn near nothing about them. It was supposed to be a non-issue.”

“Enough, Romanoff,” Tony says as she opens her mouth to protest. “I don’t want to hear it. Last night is behind us now and we need to move forward.”

It takes all of her effort not to say something snarky and sarcastic that would get her banished to desk duty for at least forty-eight hours. She has to get back out there. “Okay. Move forward where?”

“Based on what we know about Barton and his associates, Osborn is long gone,” Tony says crisply, like they aren’t discussing the fact that the man they were supposed to be protecting is most likely dead. “A team moved his wife and kids into protection as soon as they called it in.”

“So we just have to wait for a body to turn up.” T’Challa’s voice is even, and it is not a question. They all know how the mob works. This is a big deal for them - they took Osborn right out from underneath the FBI’s nose. They are going to brag about it.

“For now.” Tony rubs his forehead again, the only tell that he is stressed. Natasha leans back in her chair, spinning her coffee cup around absentmindedly on the table in front of her.

He was right there in front of her. If they had known that he was going to be there, that all three of them would be right out in the open like that, maybe they could’ve come up with a different plan. Maybe they could’ve taken all three of them down at once. She tells this to Rhodey an hour later when they are sitting in his office, the New York City skyline stretching out behind him. He got the good office, Natasha forced to give it up after losing a bet. (That was the first and last time she ever challenged him to see who could do more push ups.)

“You know that would never have happened,” Rhodey says, keeping his voice low even though the heavy oak door is closed. “Intelligence only. That’s where we’re at right now.”

“But we took Maximoff down,” she argues, even though she knows Rhodey is right.

“We can’t go after a few capos,” Rhodey says. “Even if they are Murder, Inc.”

“But think of what they could lead us to.” She leans back, putting her feet up on Rhodey’s desk, ignoring his glare. “Wanda.”

Wanda Maximoff is their new target, and if they can manage to get to her, it will be even a bigger deal than the Django takedown. Wanda has flipped the Maximoff family’s focus from drugs and prostitution to cruelty and torture and revenge. In just a few short months, she has been responsible for more murders than her father had in a year. The streets of New York are colder and darker than they were less than a year ago, and Natasha is going to be damned if it gets worse under her watch.

“Not yet,” Rhodey says sharply. “It’s too early. We don’t know enough.”

“Will we ever know enough?”

He sighs. He is used to her. “No. But you’ve gotta trust the process.”

Natasha stews in her office for the rest of the day. The process hasn’t gotten them much so far. Sure, it got them Django. But Django was never their main focus, even when he was. Everyone has known for years that Wanda was next in line, that she was the true Queen of the Underworld. And if she is the Queen, then Barton is her King.

But he is still out there somewhere, killing people and laughing about it. Every time Natasha closes her eyes, she can see that wolfish smile of his. He thinks he is above the law.

It looks to Natasha like it’s going to be up to her to show him that he’s not.

♚♚♚

The morning after he kills Osborn, Clint sleeps in.

He feels like he deserves it. It was a long night after all.

In fact, the only reason he wakes up at all is because the woman next to him stirs in her sleep, brushing up against his ribs with her knuckles. She is a redhead - not the same wine red as Romanoff, but close enough. After he had seen her up close, touched her, he had needed to scratch the itch, and if he couldn’t do it with Romanoff herself, he was going to do it with someone who looked eerily similar.

When he sits up, he grabs his phone off the nightstand. It is lit up with emails and missed calls and texts, most of which are coming from Wanda’s number two. “What, Rogers?” he snaps into the phone when it rings again, pushing himself out of bed and padding into the kitchen. He is exhausted; he didn’t get done with Osborn until about two in the morning, and the girl in his bed didn’t show up until three, waiting patiently while he showered, all of the blood swirling down the drain lazily.

“It’s done?” Steve Rogers’s voice comes over the phone sharply, and Clint rolls his eyes. Secretly (sometimes not so secretly), he can’t stand Rogers. He is arrogant and pompous and has a constant stick up his ass; Clint much prefers Scott Lang, Wanda’s advisor.

“Did I not tell you last night that it was?”

There is nothing in Clint’s fridge, and he is fucking starving. He is certainly not in the mood to be having this conversation. He lives in a giant loft apartment, all exposed brick walls and high ceilings and hardwood floors that are probably a hundred years old. The entire thing is open, not an interior wall in sight; Clint is so used to hiding ninety-nine percent of the time, so when he is at home he refuses to hide there too. Unfortunately, that means there is nowhere to go to have a private phone conversation when there is a naked woman in his bed.

“Just making sure,” Rogers says, and Clint wants to hit him.

“I don’t need to be micromanaged.”

“Easy, Barton. This is coming from Wanda, not from me.”

“Well, tell Wanda I don’t need to be micromanaged. And if you can’t, just let me know because I sure as hell will.”

Rogers doesn’t deign to give him a response, just hangs up. Clint knows he’ll be hearing from Wanda sooner or later. (It will be sooner. Wanda doesn’t sit around. In fact, he’s convinced she doesn’t actually sleep, just plugs herself into a wall somewhere and powers down because the woman has to be a cyborg to get as much done as she does.)

Sure enough, he gets a phone call not even sixty seconds later. He is still standing in front of his fridge, hoping that something other than beer and a very old lime will magically appear in it. “Yes, dear?”

“Barton.” Wanda’s voice comes over the phone in a snap. “Why are you harassing Steve?”

“Oh my God.” Clint rolls his eyes, knows that Wanda will know he is doing it even though she can’t see him, and he lets the refrigerator door fall shut with a soft click, pushing against it to make sure it latches. “Do you have him chained up somewhere? There’s no way he called you that quickly.”

“Mind your business,” Wanda says, and he can hear a glimmer of a smile running through her voice. She might be a mob boss, but sometimes she has a sense of humor, at least when Clint is involved. “And stop making Steve’s life harder.”

“You know I make it easier.” Clint hops up onto the counter, trying to ignore the rumbling in his stomach. “I make your life easier too, baby.”

She ignores him. “Tell me about last night.”

“He didn’t say anything.” Clint finds a granola bar in the cabinet behind his head, unwrapping it as quietly as possible. “Which was… kind of surprising.”

“Not even you could get him to talk, huh?”

Clint scowls even though Wanda can’t see him. All in all, it was a successful night. Osborn is dead, which is really what Wanda wanted most. There are plenty of other people who can lead them to Osborn’s informant. But Clint is used to getting what he wants, and last night he did not get what he wants.

He is also annoyed at how often he finds himself thinking about Romanoff. She was in his head all night last night, even when he was inside another woman. (It probably didn’t help that that woman looked remarkably like her.) Even now, he wonders what she is doing, figures that she is probably at the office with her team, all of them trying desperately to figure out how Osborn disappeared right out from under them. Clint tries to ignore how badly he wants to take her apart, how he wants to bring her right to the edge until she is begging for him. She’s an FBI agent, for fuck’s sake. She is truly the one person who could ruin his life. He needs to get it together.

“What do you want to do now?” Wanda asks, cutting into Clint’s train of thought. He knows that he is one of only three people who she would ever deign to ask. It’s not his job to give her advice; that’s what she keeps Scott and Rogers around for. But he knows that she trusts him implicitly.

“We can’t go after his family now,” Clint says. “Stark’s team will have them under lock and key. I’m sure they moved them in the middle of the night.”

“Alright,” Wanda says, sighing, and Clint can just picture her rubbing her temples. “Let me think about it. I’ll let you know what the next step is when I figure it out.” She hangs up abruptly, just like she always does.

Clint stretches, glances at the clock over the stove. It’s only ten o’clock, and he considers going back to bed for a couple of hours. He’s got a hell of a lot of laundry to do and he needs to order groceries and his shower could probably use some cleaning. But instead he hides a yawn against his shoulder, crawling back into bed and sliding an arm across the smooth back of the woman next to him.

That can all wait for a little while longer, he thinks as she makes a soft little noise in her sleep and rolls towards him.

Bucky shows up late in the afternoon. He lives a couple of floors below Clint, choosing to spend his money on girls and alcohol and fast cars rather than real estate. Thankfully, the girl is long gone at that point; Clint finally has food in his fridge and clean sheets on his bed, and he’s sitting in front of the television, flicking mindlessly through the channels when Bucky bursts in.

“What’s up, Buck?”

“What next?” Bucky stands directly in front of the television, crossing his arms and looking down at Clint. Unlike Clint, he is incapable of resting. Clint works hard, but he plays hard too, and when he does get a day off, he takes full advantage of that fact.

“What do you mean what next?” Clint sighs, closing his eyes. He’s still exhausted. It doesn’t matter how many times you execute someone; it really takes it out of you, Clint has found over the years.

“I know you’ve talked to Wanda. What’d she say?”

“I’m not telling you until you sit down.”

Bucky sits down reluctantly, looking like at any moment he might jump out of his skin. “Okay. Now tell me.”

Clint knows that Bucky is going to hate the answer he is about to give him. “She’s going to decide what we should do next and then she’s going to call me.”

He is not disappointed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Nope.” Clint reaches across Bucky to grab a slice of pizza sitting in the box balanced precariously on the arm of the couch. “So relax about it.”

“We need to get back out there. It’s a war, Barton.”

“I know that, Barnes,” Clint says, throwing the words at him snidely. “But it’s not going to be won in a day.”

“Well, I have an idea.”

Of course he does. Bucky is nothing if not persistent. “Alright. Tell me.”

Before he can get any words out, Sam comes wandering through the door, sitting down on the couch like he owns the place. Clint should be used to this by now; the three of them are rarely apart, even when he wants a little space. Secretly he is glad for that; he spends a lot of time alone with his own thoughts as it is.

“Welcome.” Clint grabs the pizza box off the arm of the couch, handing it across Bucky to Sam, who immediately shoves half a slice in his mouth at once. “Buck was just about to tell us something.”

“What’s that?” Sam says through a mouthful of pepperoni.

“Fill him in,” Bucky says curtly. Clint will keep letting him think he’s in charge for now. Just for a little while, until it gets too exhausting and he has to take back the reins.

“Wanda is just figuring out our next move,” Clint says. He finds a bullet in between the couch cushions, must have slipped down there when he was filling up his extra mag yesterday before the gala. He rolls it between his fingers. “It’s not as deep as Buck thinks it is.”

“Great, so we get a break.” Sam is very much on the same wavelength as Clint.

“Someone isn’t happy about that. I’ll give you one guess as to who that might be.”

“Come on.” Sam tips his head back, resting it on the back of the couch. “We don’t have to be Murder, Inc. all the time.”

“Easy.” Bucky pulls his shoulders back, and Clint can hear every bone in his spine cracking. “Wouldn’t want Wanda to find out you said that.”

Sam leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees and glaring at Bucky. “Well, then don’t tell her.”

“Okay.” Clint drops the bullet into the big glass bowl on the coffee table with a click, where it spins around for a couple of seconds before coming to rest up against the remote, a lighter, and a tiny butterfly knife. “Enough. I’m open to hearing suggestions, and if I like them, then I will pass them along to Wanda. No promises, no guarantees, and I don’t want to hear anymore fighting on my goddamn day off.”

But then Bucky reaches into his bag and pulls out a file and throws it down on the table, and when Clint sees the pictures that spill out, he realizes the fighting is far from over.

“What?” he snaps before Bucky can say anything. “What the fuck is this, Barnes?”

“Hear me out.” Bucky grabs the picture in Clint’s hand, shoving it back into the file and stacking everything together neatly. “We’ve been trying to figure out who the rat is since the trial, right? And we’ve had precious few leads. Since Osborn kept his mouth shut, it seems like we’re at a dead end.”

“Wanda is figuring it out,” Clint says icily. “I made that exceedingly clear.”

“That could take weeks,” Bucky says. “Months even. So what if we go after the head of the snake. Cut it off.”

“You want to kill Romanoff,” Clint says. He saw the pictures in the file before Bucky snatched it away. They were pictures of her going into her apartment and coming out of her apartment and walking to work and at the grocery store and a million other places that chronicle her days. She had no idea she was being photographed; the FBI isn’t the only organization with great surveillance after all.

“Yes. I do.”

“And what’s this going to accomplish?”

“She knows everything,” Bucky says matter-of-factly. “She’s got to know who the informants are. And you can bet she’ll give up her contacts after we get done with her.”

“No.” Clint grabs the file from him again, standing up and walking over to the closet sized safe built into the brick on the far side of his bed. He turns his back to the boys, shielding the combination from view as he types it in, muscling the door open and throwing the file inside to land on a shelf with stacks of money and guns and extra passports strewn around it. “That’s a non-option.”

“Why?” Bucky asks, glaring at Clint from across the room. “Because you’re into her?”

“Don’t be an idiot.” That’s absolutely part of it, but like hell is Clint going to tell anyone that. He finds Romanoff fascinating, a feeling that did not go away after he saw her up close. There’s more there, and he wants to explore it. “We can’t go after an FBI agent, not with Stark’s team behind her. Wanda would have your head for even suggesting it.”

“Fine.” Bucky sits down, and the conversation is dropped.

At least for now.


End file.
